Tag: email

So, I always hate it when I receive an email from a company to sign up for an event or download a white paper, but when I click to get to the offer, they couldn’t be bothered to pre-populate the form with information about me they clearly already had (Name, Email, etc.). This is a bit challenging without a CRM, but if you have a good mail client, it can be done easily.

Create a Form:

See example-form.html below.

Create The Form URL

Go to your email provider, and identify the merge fields you need. I use MailChimp which you can identify the merge fields for your list by crafting a campaign and in a text box clicking “Merge Tags”:

Once you’ve identified the merge fields, you can create the URL which will be structured very similarly to a UTM tagged URL:

After you regular URL like example.com/webinar add a question mark (?), then an identifier, I use “first” for first name. Set the merge tag to equal it, so first=*|FNAME|* if you’re using Mailchimp. That is one field set. To add additional, add an ampersands (&) and another identifier set equal to a form field. Continue until you have all the fields you need.

Add the jQuery Script to All Pages with Form

See example autofill-forms.js below.

This small script will read your URL and identify the information following the question mark and match up your identifier to the field. This should be added to every page the form is present on.

Identify the fields you want to auto-fill and fill them in, i.e. #firstname below corresponds to my input field with the ID of firstname. The name indicated on the right, i.e. “first” is the identifier we used in MailChimp before each equal sign. You can add additional fields as they become necessary.

Test Your URL

Once that has been put in place, test the URL to ensure the fields populate well. If you have the merge tags in place, it should fill with that tag since that is parsed through Mailchimp:

Once you verify that that URL works, test your merge fields by entering preview mode in MailChimp and choosing “Enable live merge tag info”:

(See the URL at the bottom left for the button I’m hovering over). Click through a few of your subscribers to make sure the merge fields look correct.

Codes

The other day, I realized that I didn’t have any LinkedIn recommendations, and being in consulting work, I needed some social proof. So my first thought was to use the built-in recommendation form provided by LinkedIn:

But then I thought, how many people actually read emails that come in from LinkedIn. What were the chances that the request would go unseen, thus unanswered? So I thought there must be a way to just send someone a direct link to recommend me via email.

How to Get A Direct Link to be Recommended (Prior to 2017):

View Your Own LinkedIn Profile

Scroll to the Bottom where your Recommendation Area Is

Under, “Would you like to recommend?”, right click and get the URL of the link: “Recommend YOURNAME”.

The URL is structured something like this: www.linkedin.com/recs/give?memberId=00000000

Use that URL to construct an email to your desired recommended (make sure you’re connected to them on LinkedIn).

This is where the URL links to (once they sign in):

How to Get A Direct Link to be Recommended (2017):

Use the URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/YOURUSERNAME/recommendation/write/

It will take the user to a page that looks like this that prompts for relationship & position then asks for your recommendation:

Thanks, Ethan Anderson for letting me know about the update!

How To Ask For A LinkedIn Recommendation

I could write something up about that but there is a lot of great articles already about it, so here are two I recommend:

So, I was working with Contact Form 7 with a client and for the life of me couldn’t get any forms to send to the client’s email which I had setup with Google Apps. The site is hosted on GoDaddy. So after some extensive Googling, it appears that I discovered a possible solution.

This allowed me to send a test email to my personal gmail account and to the client’s email account associated with the website with no problem but I was still unable to get the contact form to work.

To get Contact Form 7 to work, I had to make one more change:

Instead of using the primary email, I used to temp email Google assigns when an account is created, which you can keep for as long as you want. You can find it in your Google Account. Pretty sure this all have something to do with MX Records, ports and a whole lot of other complicated things that aren’t worth getting into but regardless, it worked…